Hard hitting journalism- gloves off and no punches pulled- about cartoons!

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

The French Make ART As Well?!?

A still from the new French Canadian film "La Batterie De La Vie".

I'm still reeling from seeing the new short film by Jean-Claude Phillippe DuPuis, "La Batterie De La Vie", a deceptively simple paen to mankind's ability to love and yet not love, see, and yet be totally blind, discard used batteries, yet never let them escape from the junk drawer of our souls (you'd have to see the film to understand).

Clocking in at a brisk 43 minutes, the film, done with crayon rubbings on used butcher paper, with a score by Montreal's "Mendiants Sales", a found-instrument troupe, concerns the adventures of a used battery, as it is discarded by one man, picked up by a woman, tossed in a trash bin to lay there for what seems like an eternity, found by an alley cat, only to transform itself into some sort of a magical thing and float slowly (oh so slowly) into the sky.

This film is one to be looked at, thought about, argued over, dismissed outright, rethought, then treasured for the ages with unblinking fealty.

It's hard to believe that a filmmaker this accomplished was just last year on the gallery scene, creating installations from broken hamster cages and piles of sand.

It is a testament to DuPuis' skill as a filmmaker that he is able, in under an hour, to make a sly parody of film itself that, to an untrained observer, would seem like the hack work of a boring drunk scratching away artlessly at some freehand drivel without a thought to tempo or audience endurance, while an "orchestra" of homeless crackheads smash glass and belch into plastic buckets in a weary attempt to replicate some kind of urban "Stomp" asthetic.

But it's not.

I get it.

I really do, and think it's sick. (Sick means good now!)

I actually actually liked it, and said as much to Miko, the 23 year old blonde daughter of the distributor of "La Batterie De La Vie", who is perhaps the film's most ardent supporter.